Livia Lone (Livia Lone #1)(67)
When it was over, she slumped against him, panting, and eased the pressure on his throat.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “What the hell was that?”
She smiled and thought, The dragon, you idiot. But she only said sweetly, “Did I do something wrong?”
46—THEN
In her sophomore year, Livia decided to make forensic science the focus of her justice studies major. She had enjoyed the survey forensics course the year before, and thought there would be nothing more useful to her as a cop than expertise in the science of catching criminals. Not that the other courses she took—gangs, victimology, criminal procedure, and others—weren’t interesting. They were. But those were areas for which she felt she already had good instincts, or would quickly learn on the job. A forensics focus, on the other hand, with its related classes in chemistry, biochemistry, and microbiology, was different. She thought expertise in forensics would be like a superpower—enabling her to find clues criminals didn’t even know they had left behind.
For a while, she toyed with the notion of becoming a prosecutor. One of her course books was Sex Crimes, by a former New York prosecutor named Alice Vachss. Unlike the prosecutors Rick had told her about, Vachss didn’t want to offer plea bargains. Vachss was a warrior who fought to put rapists in prison forever. Livia read the book in a single day and night, crying at some of the horrors recounted, and relating to the woman’s passion, her cold, determined hatred of the monsters who preyed on the weak. The office cowards Vachss had to work around and outmaneuver sounded horrible, but Livia could see doing what Vachss did. Putting together the case. Arguing in court. Sending rapists to prison to rot.
Around the same time she read Sex Crimes, an assistant US attorney named Daniel Velez came to the school to guest lecture on his experience fighting human trafficking. Not long after Livia’s arrival in Llewellyn, Congress had passed a new law—the Trafficking Victims Protection Act—which turned what had previously been loosely understood as “human smuggling” into a new federal crime, with huge new resources devoted to combating it. The details Velez shared were horrifying, and Livia was moved by his passion for his work. He had prosecuted a Ukrainian gang that kidnapped women and sold them into sex slavery in the United States; agricultural interests that enslaved undocumented workers by threatening to murder their Central American families; a company that provided kitchen and cleaning laborers to dozens of restaurants, all of them beaten into working sixteen-hour days and paid next to nothing.
Although it wasn’t the focus of his talk, Velez mentioned that many of the people his office had rescued had been sexually abused, and that even in labor-trafficking cases, this was common. Livia didn’t need a lecture to know that. She knew what men did to women and children the men perceived had no power, no recourse. No ability to fight back.
After the talk, Livia approached him and asked where in America trafficking was worst. He told her it was everywhere.
“But how does it work?” she said. “I mean, you’ve rescued sex slaves, agricultural slaves, domestic-labor slaves . . . How do the people who want a certain kind of slave . . . I mean, how do they . . .”
Velez rubbed his goatee. She guessed he was about fifty, but there was something appealingly boyish about his face, and she wondered if the goatee was intended to make him seem older. “You’re asking, is it like a help-wanted ad in a newspaper?”
“Yes, that. How do the buyers connect with the sellers to get the kind of slave the buyer wants?”
“Believe it or not, it’s a market, in some ways like any other. It starts at the wholesale level, and moves down to retail. Say a Mexican coyote gets a truck across the border. There are a hundred people inside. The coyote’s contacts will include smaller wholesalers—some looking for domestic labor, some agricultural, some nail salon, some sex workers—”
“And children.”
“Yes, unfortunately, children, too.”
She nodded, processing the information, trying not to let herself have feelings about it. “And then, what, these smaller wholesalers distribute to even smaller ones?”
“That’s right. Until the buyer is, say, a restaurant that needs a single dishwasher. In many ways, it’s a lot like any other market. Take produce, for example. There’s a farm that grows all kinds of crops. The farmer takes the crops to market. There, wholesalers say, ‘We’ll take ten bushels of wheat, a hundred pounds of tomatoes, a thousand ears of corn . . .’ based on what the wholesaler thinks he can sell. And then the wholesaler takes the produce to another market, where supermarkets and restaurants say, ‘Oh, I’ll take a hundred of those radishes, the same number of lettuces . . .’ Eventually, you have individual shoppers buying these items one by one in a supermarket. Or as part of a meal in a restaurant.”
Despite her efforts, she could feel her normally suppressed grief over Nason moving closer than usual to the surface. She pushed it back. She couldn’t think about Nason now. She needed this information.
“You said . . . a hundred people. In a truck. You mean a shipping container truck?”
“Yes, exactly. In fact, in Texas in 2003, nineteen people died in a container attached to the truck that was carrying them from Mexico. So many of them were packed in, they couldn’t breathe.”
“But didn’t the traffickers want to sell those people? They can’t sell them if they’re dead.”